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#777 Dec 07 2017 at 7:43 PM Rating: Good
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If you could buy the exact same product from one of two stores, and one of them is selling it for 30% less, are you honestly going to claim you'd buy it from the more expensive store?


Whole Foods is pretty popular.

Edited, Dec 7th 2017 8:43pm by TirithRR
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#778 Dec 07 2017 at 11:10 PM Rating: Excellent
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Gbaji wrote:
when businesses in this country are allowed to retain more of their profits, they don't react by just locking that money into Richy Rich style vaults and rolling around in it or something
Mmhmmm...
Bloomberg wrote:
Major companies including Cisco Systems Inc., Pfizer Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. say they’ll turn over most gains from proposed corporate tax cuts to their shareholders, undercutting President Donald Trump’s promise that his plan will create jobs and boost wages for the middle class
[...]
Robert Bradway, chief executive of Amgen Inc., said in an Oct. 25 earnings call that the company has been “actively returning capital in the form of growing dividend and buyback and I’d expect us to continue that.” Executives including Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey, Pfizer Chief Financial Officer Frank D’Amelio and Cisco CFO Kelly Kramer have recently made similar statements.

“We’ll be able to get much more aggressive on the share buyback” after a tax cut, Kramer said in a Nov. 16 interview.
[...]
That money is also unlikely to spur hiring because companies are already well-capitalized and can bring on as many employees as they need, said John Shin, a foreign-exchange strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“Companies are sitting on large amounts of cash. They’re not really financially constrained,” Shin, who conducted a survey of more than 300 companies asking their plans for a tax overhaul, said in an interview. “They’re still working for their shareholders, primarily."
[...]
But CEOs more often tout the benefits of the legislation for shareholders. Corporations are most likely to pay down debt and repurchase shares with the proceeds from a “tax holiday,” according to Shin’s Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research survey of companies, conducted in July. Only 35 percent of companies said they would use the money for capital expenditures.
[...]
Starbucks Corp. Chairman Howard Schultz, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and BlackRock Financial Management Inc. Chairman and CEO Larry Fink have all publicly criticized the legislation. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein said this month that with the economy at nearly full employment and growing at 3 percent, now isn’t the best time for tax cuts.

And John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group, said Tuesday that the Republican tax plan is a “moral abomination” in part because companies will hand over the proceeds to shareholders.

“One of the flaws is that corporations are putting their shareholders ahead of the people that built the corporation,” he said at an event in New York sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Of course, we already know this from the past...
US News & World Report wrote:
In 2004, one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings trimmed tax rates from 35 percent to just 5.25 percent.

"The reason that some experts are projecting that another tax holiday could result in a significant increase in stock buybacks and dividends is that research surrounding the first tax holiday documents this effect," says Stephen J. Lusch, assistant professor of accounting at the University of Kansas.

"The primary use of the repatriated funds was to increase shareholder payouts, particularly stock buybacks, rather than increase firm investments such as capital expenditures, research and development spending," or other such productive, non-financial initiatives, Lusch says, referencing the 2004 tax holiday.

A 2011 report by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the Senate studied that 2004 tax break and found that just 15 companies accounted for nearly half ($155 billion) of the total money repatriated ($312 billion).

Stock buybacks at those 15 companies then grew by 38 percent between 2005 and 2006, while executive compensation grew by 27 percent in 2005 and 30 percent in 2006, according to the report.

As for job creation? Those same 15 companies cut more than 20,000 net jobs between 2004 and 2007, the report found.

Now granted your argument was a silly strawman that "companies" won't just keep this money. Which is largely true. But it won't leave the upper brackets either as evidenced by the growing levels of wealth disparity over time. Most of the money is already remaining at the top. The rich will get richer and the middle and working class will get a tax hike and slashed services to pay for it.

Edited, Dec 8th 2017 12:46am by Jophiel
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#779 Dec 08 2017 at 12:40 AM Rating: Good
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When lower income people have money, gbaji understands it doesn't just evaporate into thin air right?

Money stemming from tax reduction cycles through classes as a markov chain. Ultimately both groups see some allocation, but you can affect the proportion weightings through taxation.

Please, please read up on Markov chains.
#780 Dec 08 2017 at 3:51 AM Rating: Good
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To be fair, whether a corporation's extra earnings are directly re-invested or paid out to shareholders/owners who then turn around and re-invest it in other businesses, it doesn't change the fact that it is re-invested. People with money don't just sit on it and stick it in a bank account hiding it away. They're greedy and always want more of it so they re-invest some of it to earn them more.
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#781 Dec 08 2017 at 8:08 AM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
But it won't leave the upper brackets either as evidenced by the growing levels of wealth disparity over time.
Kansas putting this hypothetical into practice for five years and having to admit it ruined the state's economy is pretty good evidence as well.
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#782 Dec 08 2017 at 8:38 AM Rating: Excellent
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
To be fair, whether a corporation's extra earnings are directly re-invested or paid out to shareholders/owners who then turn around and re-invest it in other businesses, it doesn't change the fact that it is re-invested.

What it doesn't do is "trickle" it downward. There's a reason why the wealth disparity chart looks like this and it's not because of the bottom 90% being showered with reinvested cash trickles.

In fact, what it seems to do is pull money upward. Wealthy businesses and people invest in other wealthy businesses and people to find new ways to extract money from the middle/working/lower class and reinvest that money in other wealthy businesses and people and the levels of wealth in the hands of the top bracket keeps growing and the middle/working class keeps shrinking. If someone gets a dividend payout and reinvests that money in Wells Fargo so they can find new and innovative ways to ***** people on their mortgages (side story: our new CFPB head thinks that maybe Wells Fargo shouldn't have to pay punitive damages after all) then that's not really helping the common man.

Edited, Dec 8th 2017 8:50am by Jophiel
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#783 Dec 08 2017 at 8:42 AM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
Uglysasquatch wrote:
To be fair, whether a corporation's extra earnings are directly re-invested or paid out to shareholders/owners who then turn around and re-invest it in other businesses, it doesn't change the fact that it is re-invested.

What it doesn't do is "trickle" it downward. There's a reason why the wealth disparity chart looks like this and it's not because of the bottom 90% being showered with reinvested cash trickles.

Early/Mid 80s tax cuts followed by increasing taxes?

(Dunno, don't care, was just listening to someone on NPR this morning talking about some Reagan era tax reforms that were followed by gradually increasing taxes as government revenue was too low).
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#784 Dec 08 2017 at 8:56 AM Rating: Excellent
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TirithRR wrote:
Early/Mid 80s tax cuts followed by increasing taxes?

It's actually been on a consistent climb since the late 1970s.

Edited, Dec 8th 2017 8:58am by Jophiel
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#785 Dec 08 2017 at 12:27 PM Rating: Good
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Jophiel wrote:

What it doesn't do is "trickle" it downward. There's a reason why the wealth disparity chart looks like this and it's not because of the bottom 90% being showered with reinvested cash trickles.


It's because the bottom 50% simply don't want to work. They literally do nothing at all-- and if they do have jobs, they just don't work hard enough. The LEGIT ONLY DIFFERENCE between the bottom 50% and the top 10% is how hard they work. You know, whatever the fuck that means.

It's like: If you're a janitor, and you make $7.25 per hour, and you're scheduled 35 hours a week, you can make twice that much if you mob the floor while also doing continuous backflips. If you want to triple your income, scrub the toilets with the sheer force of your desire to be there. Your employer will have NO CHOICE but to recognize you, and you'll be a hedge fund manager before you know it.

Those 10% make as much money as they do because they are gods among men. They make 30,000x as much money as the next 7 million people in their company under them combined because that is just how gosh darn hard they work. Another else is Socialism. Period. There can be no economy unless as much of our resources as possible are unnaturally squeezed to the supply side. We don't NEED consumers if we can just contain all our income within our sphere of influence. So just cut them out. They're probably all black people anyway.

It is only perfectly reasonable that people who don't have any money carry the bulk of taxes.
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#786 Dec 08 2017 at 7:16 PM Rating: Decent
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
To be fair, whether a corporation's extra earnings are directly re-invested or paid out to shareholders/owners who then turn around and re-invest it in other businesses, it doesn't change the fact that it is re-invested. People with money don't just sit on it and stick it in a bank account hiding it away. They're greedy and always want more of it so they re-invest some of it to earn them more.


1. Yes, but it's a cycle. Spring comes before Summer comes before Fall comes before Winter comes before Spring. This is why gbaji saying you have to start at Summer to get to Winter is ridiculous. It's a cycle, eventually you will loop through the process regardless of where you start.

If you give wealthy individuals more money, a certain percentage will go to personal consumption, and a certain percentage will go to investment. With that investment a certain percentage may flow into more job creation or higher wages, which gives poor people money to split into a certain percentage of personal consumption and investment. That is all through.

What is false is that you have to start at a particular point in the cycle. Business revenue doesn't spawn out of thin air, it comes from consumers. You can start with poor people i nthe cycle as well.

Give poor people more money and a certain percentage will go to personal consumption and a certain percentage to investment. That personal consumption flows towards wealthier individuals who own companies who then have more money and a certain percentage will go to personal consumption and a certain percentage will go to investment... etc.

Targeted tax cuts for the poor or wealthy don't affect whether or not the cycle occurs, but what they do affect is the timing and allocation of funds throughout the system. The water cycle still occurs whether it is winter or summer, but events like climate change shift the overall balance of how much water is locked up in ice versus how much is liquid or vapor.

This is a Markov chain.

2. He is privileging some types of money over others. The wealthy don't only invest and the poor don't only consume. A large number of non-extremely wealthy individuals have some sort of investment (say their retirement savings). While this is likely a smaller and more diffuse ownership percentage in a given company than the investment class of Americans, it's no less real. My $5 dollars of Microsoft stock is just as good as Bill Gates' $5 of Microsoft stock, he just has more of it. (Please ignore that yes there are different classes of stock).
#787 Dec 08 2017 at 8:29 PM Rating: Default
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Uglysasquatch wrote:
To be fair, whether a corporation's extra earnings are directly re-invested or paid out to shareholders/owners who then turn around and re-invest it in other businesses, it doesn't change the fact that it is re-invested. People with money don't just sit on it and stick it in a bank account hiding it away. They're greedy and always want more of it so they re-invest some of it to earn them more.


This. The reason why stock buy backs were such a big deal in the one year tax holiday scenario is related to a point I made earlier about how the corporate tax rate discourages corporations from putting money into "cash on hand" (because they have to pay taxes on that, and must do prior to a buy back). They tend to want to balance gains with debt/spending, specifically to minimize the taxes they'll have to pay. Also, it's a great time to reward the shareholders when the government isn't effectively double taxing them when paying dividends.

The short term reaction isn't indicative of long term effects though. If the tax holiday is one year long, that's the one year that corps will take advantage of it to buy back stock from their shareholders. If it's a new permanent rate, they might do that in year one, but then they'll take profits and invest it in growth once they're happy with the ratio of shares owned to shares outstanding in the market. And, as you pointed out, the cash that flows to the shareholders isn't going to go under their mattresses, and the corporations know this. Most of that money will come right back into the market, which will re-distribute it, mostly by investors looking to fund the "next big thing" with their returns from the last round of investing. Which will certainly have a positive effect, not just on the market, but on job growth/expansion as well, which in turn will raise GDP growth rates, which in turn increase the size of the tax pool.

What I don't get is statements like this:

Jophiel wrote:
The rich will get richer and the middle and working class will get a tax hike and slashed services to pay for it.


I asked you previously what you meant by something you said that sounded similar to this. I already pointed out (and did this thing called "math") to show that working class people are going to see a tax cut (likely a relatively sizable one), and even most middle class folks (I suppose that depends on where we put the "middle class"), will either see a wash, or a slight increase *if* they earn a high 5 figure plus salary *and* live in a high tax state *and* have a sizable mortgage. Which does not really support the "rich vs poor" narrative at all. Obviously, the wealthier someone is, the more likely this will result in a net tax increase for them, as the ~$20k standard deduction becomes smaller than what they could have gotten via itemized deductions. So it's really odd to trot out the usual "rich get richer while the poor get poorer" BS in this case. If anything, this will do the opposite.

There's also nothing in this tax cut plan that "slashes services". You're free to speculate about that (and honestly, I'm all for slashing some services), but that's not a part of this tax plan. The intent of the plan is to use lower tax rates to spur economic growth and repatriation of current assets placed overseas back into the US economy. The belief being that these will balance out the short term deficits within a few years, and start to outpace them after that (meaning we'll get more revenue with lower tax rates over the next 10-20 years than we would have keeping things at the current rate).

Whether we later decide to "slash services" is a separate discussion. This tax plan doesn't do that though.
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#788 Dec 08 2017 at 8:58 PM Rating: Decent
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Jophiel wrote:
Uglysasquatch wrote:
To be fair, whether a corporation's extra earnings are directly re-invested or paid out to shareholders/owners who then turn around and re-invest it in other businesses, it doesn't change the fact that it is re-invested.

What it doesn't do is "trickle" it downward. There's a reason why the wealth disparity chart looks like this and it's not because of the bottom 90% being showered with reinvested cash trickles.


Two things:

1. "Trickle down" is the most misstated thing in economics. When conservatives talk about trickle down (which we usually don't use as a label anyway), we're talking about increased economic growth and job creation. When liberals use the term (disparagingly), they are pointing out that when the boss makes more money, it does not "trickle down" in the form of higher wages for the workers. Which is a strawman, since no one in favor of supply side economic theory suggests that this will have any direct effect on the wages of any single job. What it will do is increase the number of jobs in total, including those which may pay an individual worker more than he's making at his current job. At the same time, it will increase the number and quality of goods available for sale, making the dollars of the workers buy more. The idea that the market value of a burger flipper is in any way related to the profits of the burger restaurant is absurd. It's related to the market cost calculation of a burger. Nothing more.

2. Wealthy disparity is not a problem. Pointing it out over and over, without every making an argument about why you think it's bad is not terribly helpful. One can argue that in any relatively free economic system, wealth disparity will always rise as a function of the total size of the economy itself. It's like saying that the larger a truck is, the higher the ratio of space allocated to cargo to space allocated for passengers becomes. Um. Yeah. That's the point. Economies grow faster then that disparity is greater, and grow greater as the economy grows. This is not a bad thing. It's a very very good thing. The relative amount of money different people have in their pockets is really not relevant. Your own personal economic outlook and standard of living is what matters, and it's hard to argue that this hasn't increased dramatically over the same time period that the "gap between rich and poor" has grown larger.

They're meaningless statements.

Quote:
In fact, what it seems to do is pull money upward. Wealthy businesses and people invest in other wealthy businesses and people to find new ways to extract money from the middle/working/lower class and reinvest that money in other wealthy businesses and people and the levels of wealth in the hands of the top bracket keeps growing and the middle/working class keeps shrinking. If someone gets a dividend payout and reinvests that money in Wells Fargo so they can find new and innovative ways to ***** people on their mortgages (side story: our new CFPB head thinks that maybe Wells Fargo shouldn't have to pay punitive damages after all) then that's not really helping the common man.


Again. So what? Wealthy businesses hire people. They buy products. They build products. They design things.

I don't get the repeated language as though this process somehow "takes away" or "extracts" money from middle/working class people. How do you think that happens? The corporations literally take money from their hands? They pay their salaries. They provide the goods they purchase. How are they "extracting" money? That's nonsense.

Unless you're using "working/middle class" as a euphemism for "poor people on government assistance", your claim makes zero sense. Most working/middle class people are employed by wealthy businesses (or are themselves business owners). And even those on government assistance aren't negatively impacted. They just don't see a gain. Well, except for the increased odds that they might be able to get a good paying job that gets them out of poverty and into the working/middle classes so they can reap the benefits of said tax policies. They'll be helped.

I guess I just don't get your thinking. It seems backwards to me.
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#789 Dec 08 2017 at 9:28 PM Rating: Decent
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Allegory wrote:
Uglysasquatch wrote:
To be fair, whether a corporation's extra earnings are directly re-invested or paid out to shareholders/owners who then turn around and re-invest it in other businesses, it doesn't change the fact that it is re-invested. People with money don't just sit on it and stick it in a bank account hiding it away. They're greedy and always want more of it so they re-invest some of it to earn them more.


1. Yes, but it's a cycle. Spring comes before Summer comes before Fall comes before Winter comes before Spring. This is why gbaji saying you have to start at Summer to get to Winter is ridiculous. It's a cycle, eventually you will loop through the process regardless of where you start.

If you give wealthy individuals more money, a certain percentage will go to personal consumption, and a certain percentage will go to investment. With that investment a certain percentage may flow into more job creation or higher wages, which gives poor people money to split into a certain percentage of personal consumption and investment. That is all through.

What is false is that you have to start at a particular point in the cycle. Business revenue doesn't spawn out of thin air, it comes from consumers. You can start with poor people i nthe cycle as well.


That's not the point. I'm not claiming you have to start at a particular point in the cycle. What you're missing in your analogy is that taxes aren't part of the cycle. They are a drain on it. It doesn't matter at what point in the cycle taxes are applied, they take away from it, and slow down economic growth as a result, which negatively affects everyone in the cycle.

Reducing taxes reduces that negative effect. That's it. Doesn't matter where it happens. Here's the thing though, the vast majority of taxes are paid by the "top 10%" (or however you want to measure things). It's not about a starting point in the cycle, but that any significant reduction of the tax burden on the entire cycle will always appear to "start" with the wealthiest becuase they're the ones paying the lion's share of the taxes.

We could reduce the total tax burden of the bottom 50% of the population to zero, and not have much of an effect on anything, simply because that 50% only pays 2.75% of all income taxes. You're mistake is even thinking of this in terms of "where in the cycle" the tax cuts are occurring. As you pointed out, it's a cycle. It doesn't matter "where" the drain is reduced. But any decent sized reduction in total tax burden will always appear to "start" at the rich. The top 1%, in contrast, pay nearly 40% of the total tax burden. So yeah, it's always going to look like they're getting a better deal out of *any* tax cut.

A $600/year tax burden reduction is far far more significant to a person earning $50k/year than a $100k/year reduction to a person earning $5m/year. Because the latter person is almost certainly not living on anywhere near 100% of his earnings. Probably not living on more than maybe 10% of those earnings, with the rest being invested in some way. He's already calculated how much he needs to maintain his (high) standard of living, with the remaining several million going into investments. The $100k/year decrease just increases the amount he invests. It doesn't affect his lifestyle one bit. The former person? 600 bucks, while tiny in comparison, is the difference between being able to get your car repaired, or fix the water heater, or pay of the credit card at the end of the month, versus slipping behind on payments for things because you aren't quite making enough to get by.

Relative impact to the person kinda matters, but unless we dip into tax credit territory (which is another word for government welfare), you can only reduce tax burden relative to the existing tax burden. Which is already quite small for the "poor" side of the cycle.

Quote:
Give poor people more money and a certain percentage will go to personal consumption and a certain percentage to investment. That personal consumption flows towards wealthier individuals who own companies who then have more money and a certain percentage will go to personal consumption and a certain percentage will go to investment... etc.


Correct. Again though, how do you "give poor people more money"? I happen to think that increased employment opportunities is a var better way to go then direct money transfers to poor people. The former helps people move out of poverty *and* grows the economy (cause they're producing more economic value than they are consuming). The latter just costs us all money. I've done this math on the forum before. If we assume that X dollars of consumption (or investment for that matter) has the exact same macro economic effect regardless of how the person obtained the money, then the key difference is that in the employment model, the worker produced something of economic value, thus adding to the size of the pie. In the latter case, he did not.

Quote:
Targeted tax cuts for the poor or wealthy don't affect whether or not the cycle occurs, but what they do affect is the timing and allocation of funds throughout the system. The water cycle still occurs whether it is winter or summer, but events like climate change shift the overall balance of how much water is locked up in ice versus how much is liquid or vapor.


I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Again, it's not about the people being "targeted", but where the money is currently (or, more accurately, where the money is currently coming from, which is "the rich", not "the poor"). It's not about picking between people. Again, I think it's your choice to view it that way, but I don't think it's an accurate model to use here.


Quote:
2. He is privileging some types of money over others. The wealthy don't only invest and the poor don't only consume. A large number of non-extremely wealthy individuals have some sort of investment (say their retirement savings). While this is likely a smaller and more diffuse ownership percentage in a given company than the investment class of Americans, it's no less real. My $5 dollars of Microsoft stock is just as good as Bill Gates' $5 of Microsoft stock, he just has more of it. (Please ignore that yes there are different classes of stock).


Again. Irrelevant to tax cut plans. If the objective is to increase economic growth, then you have to reduce the drain on that economic growth. That means you take less money from the cycle. Period. Doing so in anything remotely close to an even manner will always result in vastly more "tax cuts" for the rich simply because they currently pay the vast majority of the taxes. You're basically complaining about a mirage that doesn't matter one bit.

It's like having a leaky hose. Where do you apply patches? Where the water is leaking out, right? You'd be insane to approach it any other way. This is no different. If you want to decrease the economic drain of taxes on the entire system, you have to do that where the most economic drain is. Trying to apply some kind of "this person versus that person" logic to this is a mistake IMO.


I'm not making any sort of valuation of the people, or the degree to which their money spends/invests. That's totally not the issue. My point is that reducing the tax burden on the system will spur economic growth. Period. And that benefits everyone.

Edited, Dec 8th 2017 7:31pm by gbaji
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#790 Dec 08 2017 at 9:53 PM Rating: Decent
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Kuwoobie wrote:
It's because the bottom 50% simply don't want to work. They literally do nothing at all-- and if they do have jobs, they just don't work hard enough. The LEGIT ONLY DIFFERENCE between the bottom 50% and the top 10% is how hard they work. You know, whatever the fuck that means.


It means nothing, because we don't pay people based on how hard they work. We pay people based on the value of the output of their labor to the consumer of that output period. You're invented a standard that doesn't exist and then argue that it's an unfair standard. Yes. It would be. If that's how things actually worked.

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It's like: If you're a janitor, and you make $7.25 per hour, and you're scheduled 35 hours a week, you can make twice that much if you mob the floor while also doing continuous backflips. If you want to triple your income, scrub the toilets with the sheer force of your desire to be there. Your employer will have NO CHOICE but to recognize you, and you'll be a hedge fund manager before you know it.


No. Because we don't pay people based on how hard they work. Drop the nonsense assumption.

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Those 10% make as much money as they do because they are gods among men. They make 30,000x as much money as the next 7 million people in their company under them combined because that is just how gosh darn hard they work.


Again. Not about how hard they work. Drop that assumption. No amount of "working harder" will earn you more money. "Doing things that others value more" does. And guess what? As much as you might not want to hear it, a CEO who makes decisions affecting tens of thousands of jobs, and billions of dollars of capital, and can steer thousands of investors to either profits or losses, is going to have his labor valued higher than the guy whose most important decision today will be "how long after the beeper telling me to flip the burger should I wait to flip the burger"?

It's also why the whole deal of charting relative pay for CEOs and the workers in their companies over time is nonsense as well. The CEO's pay is relative to the total size of the company he's leading. The worker's pay is relative to the value of his share of the output of the companies productivity. If I double the number of workers in my widget factory, but the ratio of profits to widgets sold doesn't change, the relative value of each of those workers is *also* unchanged. Their pay should not increase because the company is now twice the size. The CEOs pay? It'll increase because he's responsible for more total dollar value of company that he was before.

The largest 100 companies in the US are vastly larger today than they were 60 years ago. They are making decisions in far more markets, in a multinational setting, overseeing far more workers, and with much larger (and more diverse) product lines. That's what that figure is measuring. Not some kind of innate unfairness in the world. But let's just count the dollar difference between the guy at the top and the guy at the bottom, as though it means something: But it doesn't.

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Another else is Socialism. Period. There can be no economy unless as much of our resources as possible are unnaturally squeezed to the supply side. We don't NEED consumers if we can just contain all our income within our sphere of influence. So just cut them out. They're probably all black people anyway.


Sigh. Hitting every narrative on the way, aren't you? The idea that companies don't think they need consumers is pretty darn ridiculous. They're well aware of this. You seem to be mistaking the idea that we should not pay labor more that its market value as some kind of broad condemnation of labor as a whole, or the people, or consumers, or whatever. That's inside your own head though. Doesn't actually exist in the real world.

Quote:
It is only perfectly reasonable that people who don't have any money carry the bulk of taxes.


You're the only one making this claim (presumably being sarcastic, but whatever). Um... Not only is it not reasonable, it's also not true. I get that there's this narrative lead by compete ignorance of the facts out there about relative taxes, but the fact is that "the poor" (or even the "working class") pay an absolutely tiny percentage of the total tax burden in this country. The rich pay the vast majority. This is not rhetoric. It's not about picking sides. It's a fact.

I didn't make that be the facts. They just are. You're free to have your own opinion about things, but please try not to have your own facts. The fact is that most of the tax burden is born by the rich, not the poor. Most of the transfer payments paid from those taxes go to the poor, not the rich. The status quo is already massively skewed towards taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And no, I'm not making any value judgement about that. I'm just stating that this is a fact, and it is the status quo, and we ought to keep that in mind when waving around phrases like how things relatively affect the "rich and poor".

You have to know where you are right now before you can make a good decision about which direction to go. The things you are railing about aren't real things at all. They're all inside your own head.
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#791 Dec 08 2017 at 11:26 PM Rating: Excellent
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I guess I just don't get your thinking.

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#792 Dec 09 2017 at 6:51 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
No amount of "working harder" will earn you more money.
...in utter contradiction to your last 10 years of posting (at least).



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remorajunbao wrote:
One day I'm going to fly to Canada and open the curtains in your office.

#793 Dec 09 2017 at 10:31 AM Rating: Excellent
Liberal Conspiracy
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I only stay off welfare because of inertia!
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Belkira wrote:
Wow. Regular ol' Joph fan club in here.
#794 Dec 11 2017 at 8:28 AM Rating: Good
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50,767 posts
Friar Bijou wrote:
...in utter contradiction to your last 10 years of posting (at least).
Ten more years and maybe he'll tell us about the importance of networking.
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George Carlin wrote:
I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.
#795 Dec 12 2017 at 10:39 AM Rating: Good
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50,767 posts
So what do you do when multiple women are publicly alleging you've sexually harassed them? Some people would apologize. Some step down without really saying anything. Some even loudly deny the charges. If you're 45 you tweet about another woman who "would do anything," "begging" for campaign contributions.
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George Carlin wrote:
I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.
#796 Dec 12 2017 at 12:17 PM Rating: Good
Worst. Title. Ever!
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17,302 posts
Speaking of Harassment and inappropriate workplace behavior...

I was recently at an OSHA training event for work, and there were people from all over the State there. And two people from another company were sitting in front of me and a coworker. A man and a woman. They introduce themselves, they were in HR or Accounting (I forget which), and he was her boss, she was relatively new to their company and in training to potentially replace him.

During the whole day, he would reach over and rub her shoulders, do the "lean back and put his arm around her" move. Very touchy-feely. After the event I talked to my coworker about it and he mentioned he too noticed and thought it was creepy/weird.

Thinking about it, and how there's all this talk about changing the culture and speaking up... in a situation like that it seems highly unlikely or even appropriate for someone who doesn't know anything about the situation to ever intervene. Because you know it looks wrong. But for all I really know she may be the guy's Wife/Girlfriend/SO. Body language aside because everyone talks about just laughing it off and going with it when it occurs, it'd be hard to trust what you see as accepting from the potential victim in that case.



Edited, Dec 12th 2017 1:18pm by TirithRR
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Can't sleep, clown will eat me.
#797 Dec 12 2017 at 1:46 PM Rating: Good
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50,767 posts
That's stupid. At the very least that's a whole room full of witnesses should you be accused by the other party.
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George Carlin wrote:
I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.
#798 Dec 12 2017 at 3:09 PM Rating: Good
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4,135 posts
No one said penises were smart. Guys, I meant no one said guys were smart.
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Dandruffshampoo wrote:
Curses, beaten by Professor stupidopo-opo.
Annabella, Goblin in Disguise wrote:
Stupidmonkey is more organized than a bag of raccoons.
#799 Dec 12 2017 at 9:35 PM Rating: Excellent
Liberal Conspiracy
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Looks as though Chester the Molester loses the Alabama senate seat. My faith in humanity is ever so slightly restored. Of course, he'll probably lose by less than 1% so I'm not ready to start singing Kumbaya just yet.
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Belkira wrote:
Wow. Regular ol' Joph fan club in here.
#800 Dec 12 2017 at 9:47 PM Rating: Good
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4,135 posts
Yeah, it's a very thin margin of human decency, sadly.
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Dandruffshampoo wrote:
Curses, beaten by Professor stupidopo-opo.
Annabella, Goblin in Disguise wrote:
Stupidmonkey is more organized than a bag of raccoons.
#801 Dec 12 2017 at 10:03 PM Rating: Excellent
Liberal Conspiracy
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TILT
On the positive side, Alabama went something like +28 Trump a year ago so that's one heck of a swing.
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Belkira wrote:
Wow. Regular ol' Joph fan club in here.
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